Safe Haven

 I'll cut right to the chase: Joe Biden is going to win this thing pretty easily. It could be what they call in layman's terms a landslide. None of the political press is going to tell you that the president of the United States is going to get crushed in an election. That doesn't make headlines, except maybe after the fact. I said on Twitter in March, "It's not whether Biden is going to win, but by how much." Here's what I see: there are swing states everywhere, which would be fine, but for the fact that they're in the wrong places. That is, the president should not be fighting for so-called "red states". North Carolina is always decently close, but a Republican in decent position for re-election shouldn't have to worry about it. Texas is one of the most Republican states in the country. It's the "new" home base of the Republican political dynasty, the Bush family. No Republican president should have to fight for Texas. Geo...

 Here's what I believe about judicial appointments: I believe that the President of the United States has the authority and the duty to nominate whomever he or she chooses for these offices. (This goes for Cabinet appointments, and other offices, as well.) I do not understand "advise and consent" to mean that a sitting US Senator cannot oppose a presidential nomination to some office, but I personally believe that ignoring a nomination for long periods, that is, to refuse to bring a nomination to the floor for a vote, is a failure of constitutional duty. If I believe that a particular nominee is unsuitable in either temperament, policy preferences, or lacking a basic sense of justice, I should have the courage to vote "no". I think a reasonable time for debate between the Senators about political or policy matters that may be germane is appropriate, but not necessarily while the nominee is giving testimony. The one thing the American people do not need or want i...

 That being said, it's foolish to pursue a confirmation right now. Progressives are usually always alarmed by Republican judicial nominations. If these lame ducks and losers force her through at the behest of a president regarded justly as lawless and authoritarian in the span of 45 days, the country may not survive. I can understand the desire to try. Trump is overwhelmingly likely to lose. They know it. If you can get a Justice you like on the Supreme Court before the clock strikes midnight, as it were, it makes sense. Romney, Collins, and Murkowski signalling an unwillingness to go along with it confirms this. If Trump were powerful, they wouldn't. None of these three will pay a penalty for opposing Trump, though Collins will lose because she voted to confirm Kavanaugh.  It's the perfect nightmare for a Republican Senator: All the chaos of a Trumpian circus, added to a nomination fight, with no discernible electoral benefit. I hate it when that happens. Barrett in the ab...

I remember spending hours learning cursive in primary school. Here it is. I write slowly, and my hand gets tired pretty easily, but you'd be able to read it. Does anybody remember when Calpurnia was teaching Scout to write? That's how it was for me. Yeah, they should be teaching cursive in the schools. We had handwriting class in the first grade. I get compliments on my handwriting, actually, which is deeply ironic, as a disabled person who does his best not to write anything by hand. Once you learn, it's in there. You know, the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, had terrible handwriting. Maybe we should check the handwriting of serial killers. Although I don't know how kind it is to tell kids, "You can write better than that! Do you want to be a serial killer?" Speaking of Ted Kaczynski, there's a fascinating documentary about him on Netflix right now: "Unabomber: In His Own Words". I wasn't really paying much attention as a teenager, when they caug...

 This is the full text of a NY Magazine piece entitled “National Review Has Elevated Anti-Anti-Trumpism To An Art Form”: Four years ago, National Review famously published an issue headlined “Against Trump,” declaring, “If Trump were to become the president, the Republican nominee, or even a failed candidate with strong conservative support, what would that say about conservatives?” NR stopped asking the question once the hypothetical became a reality. Its emphasis has turned to anti-anti-Trumpism. Most of the magazine’s writers are too embarrassed to defend Trump’s behavior outright. Instead, they focus on the foibles of his opponents, making the case for Trump indirectly. Kyle Smith’s cover story on Joe Biden is a classic of the anti-anti-Trump genre. The main theme of the story is a fairly rote recitation of the reasons conservative Republicans disapprove of the Democratic nominee. Obviously, people committed to shrinking the welfare state, shrinking regulations, and so on would...

  Read the whole thing . Pay special attention to paragraph 34. I am happy to continue arguing with Biden and Harris about abortion and related issues after the election. Until then, I oppose fascism and its enablers. Efforts to de-legitimize the election result itself --both rhetorically and otherwise--demand a swift response from all people of goodwill. Other reports of forced hysterectomies add to the list of degradations by this administration. If we are still a representative democracy in 2021, we will be blessed and fortunate.

 Let me say it this way: It is comparatively "easier" to lament hardship, death, and moral evil in the hearing of a sovereign God, than it is to believe He is benevolent, but not sovereign. Do you realize that passages of Scripture and the witness of history are troubling precisely because  God is confessed as Almighty? What's the point of crying out in anguish to a God who can't do anything? What is "faith", in a Friend who is kind, but feckless? In all this, we must understand that an account of evil, and its relationship to freedom is crucial. I might do a lot of wailing and crying, because the sovereign God allows truly heinous, unimaginable things. Why? Your guess is as good as mine. I might even dare to say--Heaven forbid!--that I think God is doing a terrible job. I won't ever say He's not there, or that He's been somehow surprised. Job never got the true answer to his questions. If you read that book of Job, you'll see that. Job is ne...

 If you've been a Christian, and you've gone to the same church for any length of time, you'll probably meet some missionaries. Mission work is a big deal, and rightly so. We love that "Go, therefore,…" at the end of Matthew's Gospel. Again, this is rightly so. But don't forget what Jesus says right before that: "All power in heaven, and on earth has been given to me." It is interesting that he does not say, "to you". What this means plainly is that anyone who shares the good news of Jesus does so in the power of Jesus. St. Paul gets pretty worked up about immorality in Corinth, and he says, "Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit?" Leaving aside the immorality for a moment, this is one of those, "Do you realize what this is saying?!?" moments of the Bible. We ourselves are temples. The adoration of Almighty God is taking place within us! There is a mystery here, but this is why Jesus told u...

 I know the blog has been a little fallow lately, but I haven't been in the frame of mind to say anything that I felt like sharing. I'm happy for the money--such as it is--that the ads on the blog slowly and surely accumulate, and which will one day be paid, but I never wanted to treat this blog like work or a chore that I was doing. And trust me, if I published every time I was in a mood, I'm pretty sure I would redefine "pariah". Anyway, you hear all the time that processed foods are bad. It's absolutely true that there are many milligrams of sodium in anything we call "processed". Presumably, large amounts of sodium is added as a preservative, in order to increase the shelf life of certain foods. There are large portions of the so-called "clean food" movement that represent nothing more than a transmuted desire for ritual purity, long since abandoned in religious practice. That said, if you pressed me, I would probably eat less sodium if...

 I'm going to refer my Catholic readers first of all to CCC, 2406 as the ethical basis for this idea. I did some digging to find out just what the capital gains tax rates were. To say that what I found surprised me is a bit of an understatement. Here's your summary moral judgment: the rates are too low, and the thresholds are too high. I am not certain that a Christian society would entertain any sort of economic instrument whereupon people could make money for doing nothing, but let us suppose that we can tolerate the stock market as it is, for the sake of argument. Capital gains are profits or dividends, if you like, from stocks and similar products. In the United States right now, capital gains are taxed at three rates: zero, 15%, and 20%. I will leave the policy wonks to handle single versus married, in these calculations. But my idea is to have four tax brackets for capital gains: zero, 15%, 35%, and 70%. The zero bracket ought to go from zero-$30,000. (If we want to give...

 I spend a lot of time with St. John and his Gospel in general, but I read a line yesterday that got me thinking. "The law came through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ." John is not denigrating the law or Moses; rather, he is recognizing the superiority of Jesus and what he brings. The law, the prophets, and the sacrifices testified that something was still wrong. God is the lawgiver, but unless He gives the power for us to truly fulfill what He desires, we'll be simply chasing our tails, ever-desiring to be better, and to be happy, with no way to get there. Without grace, all of this is just a hopeless, do-it-yourself, exhausting morality play. This is why St. Paul says, "we who are Jews by birth, and not Gentile sinners, know that a man is not justified by works of the law…" but by faith in Christ. He is not trying to create an opposition between Jews and everyone else, but exactly the opposite: it is now the time in the story when all people ...

 I will never be convicted of being a great prayer warrior, but I also truly do speak with the Holy Spirit, and He speaks with me. One thing you come to realize is that you can go deeper than the plain words of Scripture, but nothing true will ever be said without them. So there I was, reading and meditating on Luke 24, the part where the two disciples walked along the road to Emmaus. Remember how sad they were? Then Jesus comes up, playing a little coy, and asks them what they were talking about. The rough equivalent of a response was, "What, have you been living under a rock?" (Well, not exactly, but that's funny.) So they're explaining to Our Lord what he's allegedly missed--quite amusing, really--and then he tells them they don't get it. "And beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted for them all the Scriptures concerning himself." We all know that was a sermon to end them all. Remember how they reacted? "Did our hearts not b...

 Juan Williams, Nicholas Kristof, and David French. I might be persuaded to read some other columnist, if the headline manages not to be needlessly inflammatory, but I always read these 3 guys. You'll notice that only one is "conservative," whatever that means. David French reminds me of who I used to be. When I wasn't trolling people, on my very best day, I could sound like French. And no, I don't routinely read Ross Douthat. He just annoys me, on every conceivable level. Not that he never says anything good. Far from it. But behind the smart words is a schemer, trying to make peace with the indefensible. Yes, I mean Trump. And he brings his Catholicism into every bit as much disrepute as any progressive, when you realize that he doesn't ride or die with the Church, but rather, some "conservative Catholic" something. This is why I can't read George Weigel; it's the same thing. It seems like the ghosts of Novak and Buckley are haunting us. If...

 Most people who are living for money or prestige have found ways to make it sound like that's not what they're doing. We have somehow created a culture that tells us that our value is tied to what we do, or what we are able to do for someone else. The truth is that my value has been established by something done for me, completely independently of my ability to do anything. Jesus died for you and me when we were His enemies, and even now, it is not an ability inherent to me which allows me to accept the gift that Jesus gives. It is a grace which reaches down to me, to ennoble me beyond what I could ask or imagine. As I think about pushing back the dread with some distraction, or some pleasing error, the evil of which is not always apparent, it is this condescension of God that I am aware of now. In more ways than one, I am the cripple invited to the King's table, the descendant of the king's friend. I bring him nothing, and he sets before me a feast, in commemoration o...

"Who do you say that I am?" This is the fundamental question Jesus is asking each one of us. In life, we have these moments of unbelief, where what we say doesn't match what we do. What truly moves me? Is it fear? Is it some need I don't think God can truly fill? Fortunately, even if we have been Peter, denying Him three times, Jesus doesn't keep score. He can set things right with his merciful gaze. Every moment is a new opportunity to receive Him, to rest in the Beloved.

I'm fairly certain the microwave heated my Ramen noodles to roughly 4000°C. I thought, "Well, if I want to taste anything anytime in the next year, I should probably wait." I left it aside, and I wrote an email. [You wanted to hyphenate that, didn't you?--ed.] Yes. Anyway, emails take comparatively forever. This particular one was going to take 20 minutes, at least. And that reminds me, no, I did not add vegetables to my Ramen noodles. I have no idea when this particular abomination started taking off. I'm not opposed to vegetables; I like them. I decidedly do not like them in other things. Being an observant Catholic who keeps the Friday abstinence all year round, my conviction on this point deepens. You can season anything you like; you can put butter on anything you like, but I want to taste whatever it is I happen to be eating. I don't want to go on an adventure. I know the texture and taste of the foods I eat, and I don't like surprises. Maybe the ove...

Probably not. Admittedly, I have a holy picture of Him that looks rather Northern European. That is, white. Among the three choices I had, that one looked the least kitschy. I can still recognize Him, you know. I’ve seen an East Asian Jesus, Black Jesus, and others. If—more accurately—He looks like a Jew or an Arab, what is that to me? He still asks me, “Who do you say that I am?” When Saul of Tarsus was arresting and killing His followers, Jesus asked, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute Me?” He repeated it. He personalized it. Anyone who is dehumanized has a friend who understands in Jesus. We take the risk of politicizing Jesus, because that’s what He did. From the Roman Empire, to Mexico during the Cristero War and beyond, declaring, “Jesus is Lord!” has often cost people their lives. He still says, “You would have no power over Me, unless it were granted you from above.” When we traffic in racism, or even make excuses for it, we are Herod; we are Pontius Pilate. We really are on the...

I think both of these things were invented to mock me. The first thing I want to do with a dust jacket is pull it off. I suppose people invented these things so they could write exciting blurbs on the inside of the book. We all have to eat, I understand. But I've never thought, "This book would be so much less dusty if it had a dust jacket." And another thing. Has anyone ever been glad to have to turn in the newspaper to read the rest of a story? Has anyone ever enjoyed the effort of holding pages together? I had those "choose your own adventure" books when I was a kid; in that case, flipping around was the point. And if being able to separate out the sections is the point, then why not one staple in the middle of the paper, which is easily removed, if desired? I suppose as a good curmudgeon and Luddite that I should lament the decline of the newspaper, but at the moment, I am quite thankful for their online iterations. I know John Q. Tech Support isn't ...

Patrick Deneen, call your office!  [You probably think he has a phone with a cord, too.--ed.] It's Deneen; of course he does. He probably pedals to work like Fred Flintstone. [Doesn't Dr. Cross actually do this?--ed.] Yeah. In case anyone cares, it makes more sense to just hand poor people money, to make them not poor. Liberals need to stop trying to be "reasonable" with their economic agenda. Their political opponents don't care what works, anyway; they'll change tacks as necessary. Sorry. That's how I see it.

I meant to say this yesterday, and didn't get around to it. Have you ever noticed that sometimes we get into trouble when we just don't believe that our lives are going anywhere? "What's the point?" And I want to think about it beyond just the theological virtue of hope, mainly because I have probably asked for an increase of hope a million times in some formal prayer setting. I know I'm not the only one who has said things in prayer without thinking about them. And so I just asked, in plain words. I asked to be useful, and to know that I had a purpose. I know it seems a little dark, but I'm always honest with you. And seriously, how many of us feel this, and we don't do anything, or say anything, least of all to God? God is real, and He is here. In some way, we have to get beyond the, "thou shalt nots" and get to the heart. I'm not chasing some mystical "righteousness" of my own, but to be completely loved in the Beloved. M...